method acting/role play supercedes irony as cultural strategy

There's been a big generational shift. They've lightened right up this lot give or take the odd riot. Example. In my day the cool thing to do was to walk around scowling if you walked through stratford shopping centre everyone was practising scowling trying to get good at it. If you go there now young people are practicing roller skating and dancing. You would never have been allowed in my day. Um intrigued, horrified and envious all at the same time

true where i'm from too, much less hard lads and much more JLS type young lotharios.

the internet does have a large part to play, social media in particular, giving platform for the constructed, created identity and also exposing the process at the same time. so we get the stage.. "yay i can be who i want to be".. but at the same time everyone really knows that it's a play. people are starting to realise this idea of authenticity is fluid, changing costume becomes more comfortable.

I like the andre/kanye/fiddy example. great thread, i love conversations like this.
 
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comelately

Wild Horses
I thought I'd re-earth this one - I was thinking about 'ambiguity' in business, and that lead me to metamodernism. Plus I watched The Interview.

I am not an actor, and have had no aspirations in that direction, but I encountered 'Meisner repetition' (one of the principle learning tools of Method acting) in an ecstatic dance workshop in 2009 - well two actually. It was considered 'advanced' and you had to have taken some other workshops in emotions and personal history before you could attend. As I say we did a lot of this exercise, only without any kind of theatrical context or role play whatsoever - sometimes there would be one pair going at it with everyone else watching, other times we'd all be doing it at once.

It's strange, because the teacher was very much making it about communicating authentically and getting rid of the ego, all that mushy transpersonal stuff - but I did feel there was something a bit more postmodern going on. I'm not sure many other people did though because obviously the workshop was mostly full of hippie types with fairly deep new-agey presuppositions.

I get the sense that the creator of the workshop, Gabrielle Roth (btw she produced numerous albums, sometimes with interesting musicians), had some vague inkling that there was something going on in this postmodernism thing and she tried to integrate it with her approach to spirituality. I don't think she succeeded (she died a few years ago); I get a sense that she didn't think people were quite ready to really understand what was going on in the workshop - but maybe its time is sort of coming.

In her 'maps of being', we come out of 'chaos' into a 'lyrical' state by indeed 'lightening up'. One should be very, very wary of these narratives but I do get a sense of something interesting happening - it won't necessarily be all that pretty some of the time of course.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah cos this is a public forum where we make halting attempts at communication and that's like a diary entry I don't know what it means exactly
 

comelately

Wild Horses
Go on then. Something like, metamodernism is maybe as much a dialectical progression from transpersonal thinking that never really paid any significant mind to postmodernism in the first place, as it is an oscillation from away and back towards a previous postmodernist position.
 
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comelately

Wild Horses
Yeah cos this is a public forum where we make halting attempts at communication and that's like a diary entry I don't know what it means exactly

I decided to try to answer the question, but I do think the above is very strange.

Although people talk about 'The Interview' as metamodern cinema, I think 'Whiplash' is perhaps the first piece of major metamodern cinema.

You've got JK Simmons channelling both Sgt. Hartman from Full Metal Jacket and consciously reprising his previous role as 'Aryan Brotherhood' leader Schillinger from Oz to play band conductor Fletcher. And yet it's an inspirational mentor-student relationship move, am I right? Well not unless you're willing to not look take Fletcher's expressed motivations at face value - which requires a certain naivety, a willingness to look the other way on some of his shit. You've got the young prodigy Andrew, who in the director's mind has drug addiction and an early grave in front of him - but it doesn't matter, because he'll have been a great.......jazz drummer??! In the 21st century? Who gives a shit? Is it worth all that struggle to become 'great' in such a small niche? Dunno really, but ever so slightly leaning towards yes.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've never heard of whiplash or the interview or metamodern or jk.Simmons. I feel like I'm in one of those conversations where someone's talking about Betty and auntie Nora and wheezing toshack in the queens head as if they're pals of yours but you've never heard of them before
 

comelately

Wild Horses
I've never heard of whiplash or the interview or metamodern or jk.Simmons. I feel like I'm in one of those conversations where someone's talking about Betty and auntie Nora and wheezing toshack in the queens head as if they're pals of yours but you've never heard of them before

Ha. Okay - partly my fault for assuming we were definitely talking about metamodernism.

This may join some dots. Kinda.

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/22732/1/shia-labeouf-the-interview
 

comelately

Wild Horses
All that said, Whiplash is a triple Oscar winning art flick. And 'The Interview' was one of the most notorious and controversial releases of 2014. These are not obscure reference points. datwun linked to a metamodernism webby earlier in the thread.

The method is often portrayed in the media as unwavering commitment to character - working as a taxi driver and being a dick to the crew style of thing. I mean yeah, to a point - but it's also a commitment to the actual reality of the situation - if the two actors hate eachother, or one is cold or something; it's entirely proper for that to be included.
 

Patrick Swayze

I'm trying to shut up
I was really disappointed that Fletcher wasn't a figment of Andrew's imagination, but I was really high and the whole film just reminded me of an advert about anxiety.
 

luka

Well-known member
i can develop and fold this stuff into the dematerialisation stuff. identity is the bit ive been to squeamish to touch on thus far but it's unavoidable.
 

sufi

lala
i can develop and fold this stuff into the dematerialisation stuff. identity is the bit ive been to squeamish to touch on thus far but it's unavoidable.


The culture wars back then always seemed to be about keeping culture from kids. Now the moral panic appears to flow in the opposite direction. The moralizers are young people, not their parents. And the fight is no longer over what we once called family values. It’s for representation — seats at the cultural table on the basis of race, gender and sexuality — in museums, on television, in movies.
What rarely came up was biography. We rarely dwelled on who these artists were. We were students of the work — its devices, strategies, vision, achievements and problems. We were little deconstructionists. The makers’ personal story? Their intent? Those didn’t matter. The text was all. What has transpired in the past decade — the shifts in power, politics, media, higher education and economics; the calls for reckonings and representation of all sorts — might have transported us to an uneasy new place: post-text
Beyoncé as the goddess of empowerment who shan’t be blasphemed
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...orality-social-justice-art-entertainment.html
perceptive but i disagree re: the power relationships
 

luka

Well-known member
one of the things i find a bit odd about this stuff is it seems to be an abandonment of the idea of an underground and a counterculture. the old idea of who cares what the major record labels and the hollywood studios they're hopelessly out of touch or they're just propagandists for capital or whatever, ignore them.
 

luka

Well-known member
load of rubbish? i was drinking a lot in this period but i think there's something here
 
Just spotted my post there in 2014, talking the same shite. Funny I thought I'd stopped posting completely between 2011ish and 2019. memory is awful
 
I like your bit about andre 3000 and kanye - an aesthetic shift within a certain template that draws energy from questioning the fantasies an audience and performer are trading on, drake dilutes it further, uses the broadened palette of what’s now allowed. It;s interesting to think about it in terms of what’s permissible

You’re also right to point to fashion as an early indicator .. It’s more acceptable for young people to dress up and invoke different styles on a daily basis, whereas that might have been detrimental to your integrity before. where new lines drawn? push back against cultural appropriation?
 
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